The Girard Reader

Intro

(note : this is still a draft, any reactions welcome)

I recently watched a youtube video called “video games and the human condition”, by Jonathan Blow. The man who created Braid was essentially making a point about how games are designed around our “human condition”. He mainly referred to our evolutionary traits, our built-in mechanism of response to positive and negative stimuli, that are the basis for the creation of addiction. His point, which is something I have had in mind for a while now, is that games, as a true form of art, shall not give into the easy process of pulling that rope. Thou shall not exploit human’s weakness to addiction in designing your game, and what is more, designing your business plan.

Examples are well known : Blizzard’s games (at least since WoW) incorporate such mechanisms, by putting the player in a situation where succeeding at the game means getting items or achievements that require a huge involvement in time spent playing. The gameplay is designed around creating desire in the player for elements that will make him feel more successful, more unique, in the game. This is mostly done by putting everyone in rivalry, or in comparison, two things that are essentially similar. (For example the randomness of loot linked with the possibility of buying and selling them creates such a global comparison/competition between players, allowing them to involve time and resources in becoming more unique, and therefore “win” the competition). Farmville puts the same kind of limitation of people by allowing only a certain set of possible actions during a certain span of time. Other games such as Gears of War of the Call of Duty, or the Battlefield series, have seen a similar development of in-game “unlockables” and “ribbons” and stats of all sorts reported in leaderboards. Those elements all converge towards the same goal, which is to trigger a certain human mechanism of desire through enlarging comparison between player, a comparison that has the form of a competition (whether it is indirect, or in the shape of “keeping it up with the Joneses”).

Now I agree with Jonathan blow on this analysis, and I agree on the idea that games that do not pull that rope, or do it with respect of the player, are intrinsically “better” - as he points out, the question is not “is this game fun”, but “is this game providing (existential) meaning to me”.

I would like to add a few ideas to his analysis, in the sense that our “human condition” still escapes a clear definition in his explanation, or in any explanation by the way. But this element of our human condition lies in every game and how well the game designers understand it defines how deep the game feels to the player ultimately.

I will take four examples to illustrate establish the origin of the concept I want to use in order to define “human condition”, which is mimesis of appropriation (or “imitation of what one thinks others want” or, “A wants X because A thinks B wants X” whether B really does want it or not). This is still just a draft, trying to make a point about how the game design controls the imitative behaviour influences the player’s experience.

1 - The Battlefield 2 disappointment.

I still remember the day BF2 was announced, and the day I launched it and thought “this is the real multiplayer FPS we were waiting for”. The squad system and all, it seemed perfect. There was the commander, the respawn system on the leader… In the first days and weeks I was imagining that the game would inspire players to play as a collective entity, as a team, that it would be obvious that to have fun, you’d have to play the game well, which would mean acting as a real squad. Many players hoped for that, but apart from guys actively playing in clans, that never happened.

Instead the game often (like 75% of the time) was a disappointment. Sure it was fun, but so much under what it could have been. At every game session one could feel the potential it has, spoiled by the players themselves… ? Question mark. I used to believe, at that point, that players were the problem of multiplayer games ! But no, of course not. The thing was that BF2 did not understand our “human condition” well enough to be structured accordingly.

One of the typical situations going on in the game would be this feeling of the impossibility of strategy in a game that felt like it was the best way to play it to be strategic. Countless times the two teams would just fight over a single control point aimlessly, respawning players would just run to it and get shot in an instant, ad nauseam. The was a sort of crystallization around a single spot on the map that was totally “irrational” and from which the game was offering few options to escape. This happens in all multiplayer FPS games with control points, like TF2, but I’ll come to that example in a minute.

The typical response to those problems was for the dev team to look for “balance issues” in terms of weaponry, respawn time and such. But they could “rebalance” as much as they wanted, the gameplay was flawed. What was the flaw ? The game was drawing people towards the same resources (control points) in a mimetic fashion : team A thinks (or sees) team B wants the control point X, and it becomes it’s obsession to get it. In return team B sees that team A wants this point, and adopts a similar posture, a mimetic behaviour targeting the intentions of the other, not the actual real strategic value of the resource disputed. The desire of A is a copy of what A thinks is the desire of B. And the desire of B is a copy of the desire of A… who thinks it is the desire of B. This loop is a mimetic loop creating a sort of addiction : nothing else matters than to get the goddamn control point because the other one wants it, and so do (consequently) we. This is the fundamental “human condition” mechanism at play : mimesis of appropriation.

All mammals do that, but primates more intensely, and we are the most intense animals when it comes to obey this mechanism. Think of two people converging towards the same parking slot, and the violence that can come out of it if no ones abandons it to the other. Think of how children can fight for an insignificant toy just because they want to take it from the hands of the other kid. They could well have an exact same other toy, and it wouldn’t matter.

It is that same essential mechanism that was destroying the strategic potential of BF2. In some maps more than in others, but overall this was the case. Unless you had the chance to play on a server where players themselves were enforcing their normativity on the game, and deliberately resisting mimesis of appropriation to establish strategy in their actions. Fun was possible in BF2, but only if the players were disciplined enough to bring it to the game. Which, in terms of game design, is a failure.

2 - Team Fortress 2 doing it right.

This is an inevitable phenomenon that happens in all games where a non-shareable resource is disputed by two teams. The rules have to provide an option to the players to compete for it and not getting stuck in a mimetic loop, where both teams repeat the same obsessive actions ad infinitum, therefore not enjoying the gameplay itself (in BF2 : the strategy).

Such a structuration is found in TF2, for an example. Again, it is not perfectly there. From time to time one can end up in those mimetic situations where both teams just fight to death in the same corridor with no one actually really enjoying it (except maybe the übered heavy dominating half of the map - and I say this as a joke but I will come back to that mechanism later).

Let me take an example. I remember playing with a friend once on a map where this mimetic loop happened again. The vast majority of the players were killing each other at the exact same door leading to the last control point, over and over again. As the attackers were running low on time, they were just trying to push it. It was a bit absurd though, since other paths were also available to enter the last desired room everyone was fighting over. But once you get into that mimetic loop, everyone forgets about it. But suddenly my friend - despite the fact the team didn’t have much time for that - withdrew from the situation and took the other, long route. As a result he suddenly shifted the focus of the defenders towards the other entrance, and broke the mimetic loop. The attacking team won in extremis.

This example may look trivial, but it bears a fundamental difference with the situation in BF2. In here the gameplay itself - its design - incorporated a solution to break the mimetic crystallisation. As the dev team itself likes to mention for TF2, all maps are designed with many openings and alternate routes to fluidify the game. What it does fluidify is precisely those “choking points” that are spontaneously created by mimesis of appropriation, by our “human condition”.

TF2 is full of little details that are designed to limit the occurrence of mimetic behaviour. The fact that each class of character counter-picks another one, creating this rock-paper-scissors mechanism in the game. The random crits mechanism that brings inflexion of luck in potentially stagnating fight zones. And the domination system which, as fun as it is, also serves another function, which is to bring a specific information to the team being dominated. This information is not really about the skill of the other team, but about the state of the game being played : when dominations starts appearing in patterns, the other team gets the signal that his strategic behaviour is poor, and that it is possibly behaving mimetically at a time when it makes no sense.

So instead of attackers rushing to get the control point one by one after respawn, and getting dominated by a single turret, they might actually get a reality call and realize that they should wait for more players to launch an attack. This becomes possible without the intervention of a “commander” overlooking the map, who is himself subject to the mimetic behaviour (in BF2 commanders were most of the time following the flow and wasting resources). In TF2 a simple mechanism such as the domination one brings essential information to allow players who are not linked on voice chat or anything else, to analyze their own pattern of play in a very simple - but sometimes sufficient to generate teamplay - way.

In this perspective the game design of TF2 succeeds where BF2 failed : generating a certain degree of cooperation between players through the very structure of the game (maps, game mechanics, how information is sent to players). TF2 is not perfect in that respect either - no game is - but the design shows more maturity in that specific area of the design.

One may also add that, what is more, the dev team understood when it could be pulling the mimetic rope or not. Mimesis is actually very present “around” the game, in the item drop system. The hats are a very mimetic driven resource - only one that does not impact much on gameplay itself. People want those hats, especially if they are rare. Someone once offered me a new game of my choice in exchange of my Bill’s hat (that only players who owned Left 4 Dead got at the time). In that area, players are indeed manipulated and somewhat prompt to addiction - under the specific form of collectionning. But it is not breaking the game itself, it’s core design, even though it may be judged manipulative, and ultimately less respectful to the players than just making those objects available for free or at will.

3 - Braid.

As for many, Braid was really a sort of revelation to me as to what the media of video game could be in terms of specific media. The game is an incredibly harmonious work between gameplay and game content, and meaning-generating experience.

For a while I tried to understand what was so special in it to make you feel so good about playing it, especially a few hours after your game session. It was not the challenging aspect of the puzzles. It was the type of challenge it was offering.

And that is a non-mimetic one. That is a challenge in which you are not manipulated at imitating someone else’s intentions of getting a given resource. You can only imitate your own intention, that is being in a rivalry with yourself. The gameplay mechanism of rewinding time made this rivalry possible in the best way because you could never lose against yourself, only get better and learn from your mistakes. This rivalry was actually turned into a cooperation with yourself, rather than a fight. In anthropological terms this game established “positive mimesis” and not “negative mimesis”. In positive mimesis you imitate an intention to reach the same goal without wanting to be the sole owner of the resource. In negative mimesis, you think you have to kill the other one to get the resource because it cannot be shared.

Braid did many things right to achieve that. First, it’s a single player game - at the exception of the speed run leaderboards that introduce a form of competition in the game. But even then, being successful at the speed run means sharing a better knowledge of the puzzles with others, which they can benefit from. They might want to beat you (which is entering in a rivalry) but to do so, they will first need to cooperate with themselves to get better at solving the puzzles. That’s the second things it does right : the game mechanism eliminates frustration in the rivalry with yourself. You are never “not good enough” to succeed, you’re always “not good enough… yet”. You don’t know when you’ll solve the puzzle, but you know you will.

This last element is important : controlled randomness. It works, in a way, like the crits in TF2, bringing some certainty value to your actions, even though you can’t predict how they will turn out exactly. It is interesting to notice the presence of random mechanisms when you know that all cultures in human history have always used randomness to put an end to injustice around shared resources. For an example, the Egyptians were sharing the shores of the Nil river this way. The parcels to cultivate were available in limited amount, and they were not all equal in terms of quality. What they did was to attribute them each year randomly to the farmers, with the corrective mechanism of being insured against bad luck. As a farmer, you knew you would have the good parcels at least one time in, say, 5 years. You didn’t know when, but you knew you would eventually. This was very effective in stopping people to kill each other for the best parcels.

Back to game design, a similar function is met by random mechanisms. Whether it is in a multiplayer or single player game, the role of a certain event occurring randomly fulfills the function of defusing extreme forms of tension and rivalries. You might be dominated at some point in your TF2 game, but all of a sudden your crit rocket sends half of the opposite team back to the respawn point. Unfair, but very fair indeed - as in establishing-good-mimesis-fair.

In Braid you might get stuck for a while on a certain level, but your trials and error and thinking will get you out of it for sure. You know this because you know the game developer is not messing around with you, being dishonest into building impossible puzzles. Everytime you find the solution to one you have this eureka moment “it was so simple, how did I not see it ??”.

It respects the player in not placing him in a situation where he will be encouraged to behave mimetically without options to get out of the mimetic loop. (In this case, just failing without seeing hope for success, leading to frustration).

4 - Minecraft and the multidirectional mimetic flow.

Last but not least, Minecraft comes in as another example of mimesis done right. It is still hard to see how exactly it does it right, but it does.

The first thing a Minecraft player will notice is how any single interaction he has with the game and the world in the game will leave a trace. And after a few hours, what the player sees his a game-filtered reflection of himself, of something deep in him. Just like when one draws or builds something with Lego blocks. So the first thing the game does to you is mirroring something in you : how did you shape your house (if you made any), your mine, which is the spot you chose to play in, etc.

The second thing one may notice is how hard it is to achieve some of the most elaborate things in the game, such as intricate redstone (electrical) systems, and how knowledge has (most of the time) to be shared with others in order to enjoy those aspects of the game.

Then you have the ecosystem of the world itself resisting you : you have to find the resources, protect yourself from various dangers, and to understand how minerals, plants and animals can be associated to produce new materials leading to new gameplay possibilities.

It is not so much that it gives your imagination a lot of room (even if that is the case). It is that all actions you’ll want to perform will need you to develop the gameplay itself - and again the only rivalry that this allows is one with yourself… at which you can’t really fail given the fact that any block can be mined and re-built.

The game produces meaning all the way along the experience because the only way to play is to put some meaning in it. You cannot play the game by competing with something, not even the monsters present at night. Any single action requires a decision that will become obvious to you after you’ve actually made it real through your actions. “Did I build this ??” or “What was I trying to do here ?” often comes to mind when playing.

In this sense the game is like BF2 while at the same time being the exact opposite of a BF2-shaped world : it does not give you options to get away from mimesis of appropriation because it just does not generate any. If many people just seeing the trailer of the game, or hearing people talk about it respond by “I don’t see the point”, it is precisely because the point is that the game design is not about what usual games are about, which is giving you a predefined point (how to win at the game) through competitive actions to resolve. The “rivalry” generated in Minecraft is almost 100% “good mimesis”, in the sense that it requires you to put cooperation and meaning in all you do in order to enjoy the game.

To conclude

The “human condition” is indeed a prevalent element in game design and, understood in mimetic terms, shows how games succeed or fail at inspiring players who play them, to the point that it can become a tool of introspection, as well as an opportunity to relate to more general questions about how actions take their meaning, and how different principles of behaviour can change the result of your actions.

Game design is yet still in its infancy, but already game developers are seeing the potential in providing the player with a respectful, existential, meaningful experience in a way that no other media can.

In the recent years, the bookstores have seen their shelves inhabited by a new kind of self-development book : books about coaching. How to become a coach, how to find one, how to understand the power of coaching. Coaching federations have grown worldwide, and more and more companies implement systematic use of coaching in a variety of work settings. Coaching, however, is only but vaguely defined, in the best case as and activity of counselling, advising, in which the coach helps the client to ask him/herself the right questions. In a spirit of honest care, the coach becomes a socratian practitioner, helping the client to find the right questions and answers within him/herself.

More interesting is why coaching is rising. The working environment has evolved, they say, as it has become faster, more complex, with individuals handling many different roles, which makes it hard for them to take fresh perspective on their actions. The coach is a rented brain that helps one to take the time and think about things under a new light.

This evolution is usually described as a consequence of globalization, which induces more competitiveness and therefore a state of “crisis”. It is probably correct to say so but insufficient if one has to understand what exactly coaching is the symptom of. 

From the anthropological point of view, what is happening is nothing more than the de-activation of basic cultural functions because of the growing indifferenciation. As all the antagonists (economic actors) become defined more and more by their position on an indifferenciated market (of absolute competitiveness), they start losing touch with the cultural functions that allow them to create differenciation (local strategies, enforcement of values, or just specific positionning on the market).

Typical cultural functions allowing to do this are the ones using time and space mediation : non-instantaneous exchanges, non-global consequences in investments, non-fully-reversible speculative investments (i.e. non absolute liquidity of value). And more socially speaking : time for yourself to think, to get in contact with other people who help you to think, and who also do something different from what you do (non-specialized advisers). Those things are being deactivated progressively by the structuration of the work market.

The coach is nothing more than a generalist that comes back and is paid for re-activating those functions at one specific time. In other terms, he is the symptom of something very modern : culture destroying it’s own barriers against negative mimesis (social tension in Girard’s terms), and giving rise to a category of agents selling those barriers back to the individuals in need of them (and therefore playing the game of raising the mimesis level, since essential cultural function become a commodity that has a value too).

I am not sure we fully appreciate what it means in terms of destruction of the social fabric, but I would speculate on the future rise of the category of agents in charge of dealing with the loneliness of the coaches.

[notes : this article was written while the riots were happening and would need some extra information and analysis to reflect the present situation, including the government’s response which mirrored the ritual aspect of the riots themselves. Special thanks to Frances Aldson for her precious help in writing this piece !]

The striking feature of last week’s riots is the difficulty in explaining them. At first glance, they appear irrational and nonsensical in the absence of a visible political message. As Zoe Williams highlights in her article on the psychology of looting (Guardian, 9 August 2011), the political response has been to label those responsible as simply criminal. Sociologists are delving deeper to look at poverty, societal disconnection and despair as the root cause of the violence and theft. Psychologists, on the other hand, are exploring what makes people not only steal, but take the time to try clothes on before taking them, and on what basis they choose certain items over others. But while socio-economic and psychological explanations undoubtedly have relevance, much remains unanswered; answers that could be provided by a look at the theories developed by 20th century French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard.
 
In his book “Things Hidden since the foundation of the world”, Girard developed what came to be known as the ‘mimetic theory’; an explanation of violent behaviour focusing on the structural role it plays for all human societies. It states, in a nutshell, that the propensity of individuals to imitate each other will lead to a range of behaviours, namely generalised conflict and the creation of sacrificial rituals to overcome the difficulties of survival brought by the chaos of that conflict. A ‘Girardesque’ explanation of the London riots would flow as follows:
 
The riots as a form of ritual
 
A “riot” is a form of disorganised, spontaneous, and collectively induced violence. A part of society has suddenly decided to erupt into a state of violence, and as some journalists have noted, without even hiding their faces. For Girard, that kind of behaviour has a name, and this name is a ritual. A ritual always has a purpose, even though that very purpose remains hidden to the eyes of the perpetrators. Take a definition he gave of this in an interview around 1980 :

“If you look at primitive rituals, what do they consist of ? They consist of a community voluntarily going into a crisis. A form of disorder. In order to reach sacrifice. This type of ceremony, which is the typical primitive ritual, is a reenactment of the scapegoat phenomenon ; understood as a sacred dispensation coming from the divinity.” René Girard

The rioters as a modern scapegoat

It is generally accepted that the rioters did not represent a cross-section of society.  Rather, they were typically young and from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds.  For a ritual to take place, there needs to be a large group of people acting together as one imitative entity.  This is precisely what images of the riots depicted.  But what was it that transformed these young people into such an imitative entity?  The answer according to a Girard analysis is that they felt united by a sense of being a scapegoat of modern society.  In essence, this means they belong to a section of the population chosen by the rest of society as responsible for society’s malfunction (accused, for example, of being a burden on the public budget, irresponsible with their own lives, and disproportionately affected by budget cuts and other government reforms). The depictions of the typical rioter as the young man with his face hidden under a hood and his eyes protected by the darkness of a deep night is a further example of this scapegoating : it is all their fault. Not ours. We can’t even understand why they started burning those cars. “They” are the faceless threat that the government is now trying to identify (Cameron: “we will go over their faces one by one to arrest them”). Giving a face to an invisible violence is actually a definition of “scapegoating”. The focus on and particular portrayal of that section of the population as ‘a problem’ has led it to perceive itself as a recurrent victim of our society.

The accumulation of internal tension

This scapegoating causes a build-up of internal tension among the scapegoated. Following the thoughts of Hiller as cited by Zoe Williams in her article, if a certain set of minimal conditions are absent from a section of the population, that section will inevitably feel their belief in having a role to play in society weaken or even disappear. This is particularly true in exceptional situations such as the riots in which collective imitation becomes a prime phenomenon. It is not possible to feel a sense of belonging to a group if that group is constantly sending a double-edged message : to be part of this group, you must be this and that, but yet you do not have the means to conform as required. Hence the accumulation of anger and frustration - the internal tension.  

Collective crises like the riots are triggered by a need to expel the internal tension, and this expulsion is achieved through the act of sacrifice. “Rioters” imitate each other into getting more and more violent and choosing the next targets. And the choice of those targets is prime in understanding the role they play for the perpetrators.  

Choosing a new victim.

The accumulated internal violence within a scapegoated group has to be expelled, but in order to do so, the perpetrators of a ritual will hunt for a new scapegoat: a victim to be sacrificed, and whose sacrifice they all tacitly agree upon. To be a “useful” victim, the perpetrators of the ritual (here, the rioters) must feel feel that the sacrificing of the new scapegoat (here, the burning and stealing of goods and property) will restore the peace. And the reason why the sacrificing of the scapegoat has the potential to restore peace  is because it is perceived by everyone in the group as being the source of the tension, directly or indirectly. It is the one thing that is capable of alleviating that tension that now has to be expelled. But why were the rioters both burning and destroying things, and stealing them for their own enjoyment? Simple - a scapegoat is feared and respected at the same time: it brings chaos, but through its destruction, it also restores peace. It is always a dual figure, and its power works both ways. Its expulsion leads to the violence it has brought in also being expelled. This is why in every ritual the sacrificed figure is always respected and hated. Revered and targeted with aggression. Prayed to and insulted. Stolen and burned at the same time. Like cars, shoes, and TVs. This is what has happened here: the rioters (i.e. perpetrators of the ritual) found their victim, the symbol of all that is bad for them, but also good. And they followed the mimetic logic of sacrifice by destroying and keeping a part of that victim for themselves, as if to voluntarily accept a small share of the power it has on them. 

But why then, as some commentators have pointed out, did the rioters not target luxury goods and the areas of Britain’s cities that are symbols of the power of those that have scapegoated them - Britain’s wealthy and powerful elite? This is explained by the very fact that it is an imitative act and not a rational one. In all mimetic events, the first objects to be targeted are those that are the closest to the perpetrators. It is never the Queen that you want to seduce, always your best friend’s wife. A ritual is not planned, it is a spontaneous search for a way to restore peace (of mind), through the generalisation of violence, which has the potential to lead to a sacrifice. The things ‘sacrificed’ - in this case, burnt and stolen - need not be the “real” cause of their problems; it is sufficient that there is an agreement among ‘society’s scapegoats’ on burning and stealing those things.

Can we break the cycle of violence ?

And where does that leave us ? Probably where any ritual leaves a community: at peace for a while once the sacrifice has been executed (society is now securing criminal punishment of the some of the rioters, while the others will feel a sense of accomplishment that the violence has for now been expelled). But a ritual’s effects only last for a certain time. The very political question raised in such events is then the following one: how do we turn this temporary peace in a lasting one ? How are we portraying the relationship that those rioters have with the world they live in, and apparently fear and admire at the same time ? How can we compensate for their need of sacrifice ? Will we act like them and look for a substitute, by encouraging the cycle of vengeance via repression ? Or will we try to break the circle of mimesis by providing new, intelligent solutions and alternatives to sacrifice ? Let’s hope that we won’t have to wait for the next city to start burning to find out what the smart step to take is.

If you look at primitive rituals, what do they consist of ? They consist of a community voluntarily going into a crisis. A form of disorder. In order to reach sacrifice. This type of ceremony, which is the typical primitive ritual, is a reenactment of the scapegoat phenomenon ; understood as a sacred dispensation coming from the divinity. René Girard 

The puzzling events, qualified of riots by our medias and politicians, which are happening now in the UK, and have happened before almost in the same fashion in France in 2005, are (un)surprisingly close to this definition of the ritual given by Girard.

A community voluntarily going into violence. 

A reenactment of the scapegoat mechanism.

Cars burning, shops vandalized in London…

Are the rioters just trying to reenact a sort of ritual to free themselves of their position of scapegoats for the whole society ?

Violence ?

As read through the mimetic lens, the “riots” are all but a blind and meaningless form of violence. They are thought to be so because it is hard to understand why they seem to both target a specific type of victims (material goods and some of their representations) while at the same time lacking some kind of political representation (no leaders, no message). 

The medias have spotted the “mimetic” nature of the movements accurately : gangs, bands, following each other, building on the example of some to lay devastation in the streets.

But the general understanding of this “mimesis” falls short in regard to a real explanation of the causes present at the roots of such a movement. The mimesis that is present here is not only the one making different rioters imitate the rioting they see others perpetrating. 

Or scapegoating ?

The other side of the mimesis at work here is that those individuals are themselves perpetrating this huge ritual out in the open. They are looking for their own scapegoats. Literally burning them : cars, shops.

As Girard puts it : the crisis can only end when the scapegoat is sacrificed, or when its substitute is. 

As sociologists put it : the young and poor of our cities are the scapegoats of our civilization. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NalRVGQIZM)

As the young put it : they do not want to be the scapegoats and are looking for their own, transferring violence onto other victims, being here the symbols of their demise : expensive clothing and cars, banks… As some politicians had anticipated. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItK1izQIwo)

The ritual substitution.

Hence one cannot stop at the “superficial” layer of the imitation at work here. In doing so, one will only see the superficial layer of the situation : one will think that the rioters are just stupid thugs stampeding the innocent city. The fact that those rioters are often young and seem to lack education and manners (as Cameron put it “they have no sense of respect”) are only operating as factors of selection for the society into blaming them. (Just as being black is a factor of selection for seeing one’s rights being neglected by the majority of the population).

The deeper layer is to see that if they are young and poor, they hence are likely to be taken as scapegoats, and hence likely to refuse that situation. Sociologists could say that society keeps them poor more or less voluntarily, precisely to use them as scapegoats (which is actually turning in a self-fulfilling prophecy). The deeper layer is that the imitation at work here is not the one of deciding to be blindly violent for the sake of it, but to expel the violence they have been targeted with on a substitute, on another scapegoat of their own. And their criteria of selection are the symbols of their perpetrators’ identity : things.

And where does that leave us ? Probably where any ritual leaves any community : at peace for a while once the sacrifice has been executed (either the young rioters will be sacrificed through repression, either they will end up burning all they can and stop with a feeling of accomplishment). But a ritual’s effects only last for a certain time. Next city ?

The regular criticism

A recurrent criticism addressed to Girard’s theory is that is falls short in respect to explaining the “political and ethical dimensions of our lives”. That is to say that by creating this “system” of a one-principle based explanation of culture, the mimetic theory would in the same time necessarily be blind to any cultural phenomenon not falling into the “framework” of mimesis. 

In other terms the criticism is the following one : the mimetic theory is descriptive. It provides a powerful descriptions of “tribal” or “violent” phenomenons, but doesn’t help to think of politics today because it can’t go deep into the details of what’s happening today. What does the mimetic theory have to say about contemporary conflicts like the one in the Middle-East that isn’t just general blah-blah about the rivalry of the mimes ? How could anyone argue that it is “useful”, that is helping to unlock new conceptions of how politics work and should be worked at ?

In this article published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Christophe Baconin expresses this judgment on this theory that really seem difficult to apprehend. It’s a good one but we feel like we can’t really do anything with it. The title of the article “L’homme d’une seule idée” suggests that the fact that the theory operates an explanatory reduction is the very problem of it, although it gives it a lot of power at the same time. As Baconin states it : 

Rien en effet dans cette conception « naturelle » de la violence ne permet de penser la dimension politique de notre condition humaine.

Ce vide qui traverse son œuvre de part en part n’est pas sans lien avec son absence d’intérêt pour un double événement décisif de notre histoire : la naissance de la philosophie et l’invention du politique.

The misunderstanding

The difficulty here is a tragic one : Girard’s readers consider his theory, because it stems from “one principle”, to be descriptive. When Girard states that philosophy and politics should be read from the mimetical point of view, they understand that for Girard philosophy and politics are “epiphenomenons” of a single real reality : mimesis and sacrifice. They have this mental representation : Girard is trying to have his “system” fit the totality of social phenomenons (after all he says himself that he built a theory of culture), and in so doing hastily neglects the essence of cultural forms such as philosophy and politics. Which may actually require a totally different conceptual framework to be addressed effectively.

This is a good point, but it unfortunately is the result of a misunderstanding concerning the mechanics, the epistemological grounds on which the mimetic theory was founded.

For it aims at being generative and not descriptive. A generative theory is a theory that only uses categories to represent phenomenons when those categories have been generated - that is to say when the “how they came into existence inside of culture” has been established. 

One has to keep in mind that Girard’s concern is to explain a single reality : the universality in time and space of the religious phenomenon, and the 100% correlation it has with sacrificial institutions. To do that, Girard explains that culture always develops ways to HIDE the sacrifice as being a sacrifice. This means that the categories developed in language to talk about reality will also bear that weight : language itself is marked by this attempt at always hiding the most obvious fact of culture - sacrifice, exclusion, scapegoating…

Girard’s refusal to think from categories such as politics and philosophy is not a prejudice or a stubbornness regarding how important and idiosyncratic they may be to culture. It is to say that we cannot think from those categories until we have generated them in our representation of culture. It is to say that we should not start from them until we know to what extent they participate in HIDING some forms of sacrifice. That, is the essence of a generative approach to culture. And so far Girard believes that those categories, when used to represent cultural realities, are indeed participating to the blindness concerning some sacrificial deeds of our culture.

Those topics, philosophy and politics, are not absent of the mimetic theory at all. Quite on the contrary, they shine by their difficulty to be thought of : and we all have this difficulty in share. It is not the mimetic theory that makes it hard to think about them in a fruitful way, it is our lack of understanding of their sacrificial potential. That, really, is what the mimetic theory provides : it tells us that if we are desperately looking for the magical theory that would help us improve political theory, and not finding one, it is (hypothetically) because we can’t create this representation of it’s sacrificial nature. And for that we end up blaming the mimetic theory itself, of course : who else but the one unveiling what we don’t want to see could be the best choice for criticism ? (Note : this is half a joke. End of note). 

I hope that one day this misunderstanding will be resolved, since it points readers towards a sterile direction to understand the point of Girard’s work.

The ambivalence.

With consumerism being viewed as modernity’s last ritual, and nature being the scapegoat feeding the sacrifice, we see modernity as a principally “negative” form of culture that has forgotten how to manage mimesis. But in the same time, the root of modernity is its capacity to reveal the very existence of the scapegoat, and by then “de-sacralizing” culture. Once the scapegoat’s innocence has come into light, the unanimity directed against him may not work anymore. Modernity, if it always forgets that it has to re-invent tools to manage mimesis, also always remembers that mimetic rivalry must not be managed by the means of sacrifice and scapegoating.

It is however difficult to observe this ambivalence, precisely because it escapes the categories that we usually use to describe social dynamics. From this perspective it is interesting to see that new concepts are being created, precisely in the attempt to turn the hidden scapegoat status of nature into a clear status of innocent victim.

An observable example : the creation of the Ecocide concept.

Of one those concepts is the “Ecocide”. Litteraly “crime against nature”, or more precisely “act of killing the system of relations and exchanges”. It is an attempt to describe the condition of nature as something that is being killed on purpose. This idea is a shift if we compare it to the usual conception of ecological arguments, which is “a finite world with limited resources that we must not exploit excessively”. 

The Ecocide concept introduces a shift in the representation of both causes and effects. Nature is now purely seen as a victim that needs to be saved, just like any other victim put in danger by our actions. This is an interesting personalization of Nature as a scapegoat making a point that has nothing to do with reason, but much more with modern moral justice.

This shift is actually a good representation of modernity’s ambivalence : both perpetrator of the sacrifice, and in the same time emancipating (or trying to) itself from its violent management of mimesis. It is in that regard very interesting to note the following goal of the concept of Ecocide, as explained by Frances Aldson in her article : 

Equally, if not more, important is that it serves as a deterrent, engendering a change of mindset and corporate attitude that revolutionises ‘business as usual’ scenarios.

Shedding light on the consumerist ritual.

The explicit goal of the concept is here to shed light on a reality, being described as “a crime”, a persecution, comparable to any other persecution among humans. It is trying to turn this “ritual” against nature into a visible thing, so that “business as usual” cannot be occurring anymore. Business as usual is another expression for “unanimity against the victim”, since the very function of a sacrifice IS to maintain the order as it was in “normal times”, as usual.

It is hence very interesting to observe that even though the trend of sacrificing nature seems heavy and hard to change, just like any unanimous conviction is, modernity is from within always attempting to reveal this mechanism to the perpetrators. The concept of Ecocide is a symptom of this ambivalence, which is important because it allows an interpretation of modernity that does not fall into Manichean considerations and explanations about what had happened and what should be done. It re-opens, in a way, room for anthropological reflexion and considerations that are reaching a wider audience than the legal specialists.

It is striking to see that major contemporary social problems are discussed by philosophers (and others) in a way that leaves everybody unsatisfied, but that no one seems to be able to avoid. That way is the “we must” way. Example : “according to my theory, we must create new ways to integrate technology in society”. Or “if we consider this hypothesis valid, one must establish an urgent criticism of this and that”. 

The “we must” syndrome is widespread. It is present in almost every conclusion of every article dealing with urgent matters, such as ecological problems or risk protection. And it always seems to be accepted as a logical way to talk about those problems : everybody wants solutions, why else are we thinking ?

But the “we must” bears a lot more than the weight of an innocent (and well-informed) recommendation. It is the consequence of the very structure of thinking prevailing in modernity. And that structure can be regarded as sacrificial, or more precisely ritual.

The ritual nature of that kind of explanation or normativity (“we must do this”) lies in the fact that it calls to an abstract “we” for the one part, and that is assumes that the obligation or action called for plays the role of a Solution with a capital S. 

The we : this structure of argumentation refers to a third actor, not the author, not the experts or politicians, or you and me, but a “we” that is a given. This third actor (not you, not me, “we”) is projected : it refers to a sense of community, to a global social subject that would be at the source of action. It established the existence of “collective action”, probably because we all think it does exist and we all think we have seen its effects throughout history. But the nature of this collective action is not provided - it is set as a sort of transcendent element to the situation. “We”, the transcendent “we”, has to do something. In “Girardian terms”, this is positive scapegoating.

The must : this part of the argumentation suggests in its very essence that there is a mechanical reality that we can use to perceive and control the problem. IF we do this, THEN we will address the problem. Hence we must. The problem in using this category of obligation is that is cuts the reflexion off the elements of the situation not anticipated by the rationality at work to talk about it. In other terms, it gives the impression that there is a certain way to address a particular problem while using the rationality first used to describe it as a problem. If we see violence and describe it as such, and consequently identify a cause to it, and enforce norms to control it, we believe we have controlled violence. But it may be that violence is re-emerging under new forms that are invisible to the perception that first described it. It escapes the “frame”, the mindset used at once. Here too, the category of obligation reinforces the positive scapegoating of the argumentation - there would be, somewhere, sometime, the answer to it all. 

This is all interesting in one respect : it shows that the very way language and reason (the logos) were built by mankind are somehow designed to hide the action of scapegoating at a very fundamental level. Not only did culture hide the actual victim of a real sacrifice, but it also incorporated structures of thinking orienting the creation of concepts and categories used to perceive reality in that way.

The way we think is oriented in explaining all but the very fact that it has a lot of trouble not imagining transcendent (hence contradictory) answers to major questions. We could suggest that this is especially the case for “important questions”, defined as the problems resulting from the huge increase of mimetic rivalry of our world (economy, industry, agriculture, technology). It seems that our thinkers have to see everything in those situations but the fact that they are the symptom of that mimetic rivalry. Maybe because it would deprive our civilization of its last effective ritual (consumerism and the destruction of nature) ?